Philosophy Talk

The Popol Vuh, written in 1702, was based on a Mayan oral tradition encompassing creation myths, history, and cosmology. These stories were written in a time of crisis: European colonialism had decimated the Mayan population and destroyed much of their cultural knowledge. How do stories help a society survive and thrive? Can they console us in times of crisis? How much of a culture can historians...

Human beings share the planet with many different organisms with vastly diverse ways of life. We like to think we’re a higher form of intelligence. But are we really that unique? How different are we as a species when it comes to language, thought, and culture? Where does our specifically human form of consciousness come from? And if other animals are so similar to us, should we stop eating them?...

Activist and anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman fought for human liberation in every realm of life. While she opposed the women’s suffrage movement, she was a staunch advocate for women’s rights. So why did she think the right to vote was so unimportant? What did she think was required to achieve her anarchist goals? And how ahead of her time was she on labor, prison abolition, and sexual liberati...

French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil was also an activist whose goal was to elevate the lower classes.  But she was opposed to the kind of revolution where the oppressed overthrow their oppressors. So, how did she think we could achieve peace and justice? Is it enough to pay the right kind of attention to each other’s suffering? And how does this connect to her conversion to a mystical form o...

Born into slavery in the nineteenth century, Anna Julia Cooper received a classical education, attended the Sorbonne, and became the fourth African American in history to be awarded a PhD. Her first book, A Voice from the South, offered one of the first articulations of how Black women are impacted by race, gender, and socioeconomic class. She believed that uplifting Black women through higher edu...

Karl Marx famously attempted to explain our social, political, and economic systems in terms of class conflict. While he never explicitly states that capitalism is unjust, some scholars suggest that there is an implicit moral critique of it in his work. So, does Marx reject capitalism for its moral failures, or is his opposition to it purely socioeconomic? Can we get an account of gender and racia...

We all engage in mental actions of various kinds, whether it’s planning the coming week, trying to remember the lyrics of a song, or imagining what we’d look like with a different haircut. These thought processes have significance for us and help us direct our other actions. But are we really in control of trains of thoughts or do they just pop into consciousness? Does it make sense to criticize o...

Hildegard von Bingen was a 12th century mystic, polymath, and composer whose work spanned visionary theology, philosophy, cosmology, medicine, botany, and music. Her extraordinary intellectual accomplishments belie her humble claim to be “just a woman”. Was her humility justified in the face of the divine, internalizing misogynistic stereotypes, or a strategic decision to get her voice heard? What...

People often speak on behalf of others, like the concerned citizen who stands up for their neighbors at a city council meeting, or the activist who defends the rights of an oppressed group. Some of these spokespeople are elected, and some volunteer, but others simply get drafted into the role. What gives someone the right to speak on behalf of others? What responsibilities do they take on when the...

Nísia Floresta was a 19th-century writer and translator known as “the Brazilian Mary Wollstonecraft.” She published the first book on women’s rights in South America, when Brazil was gaining independence from Portugal and a new post-colonial nation was being built. She also argued for the rights of the enslaved and indigenous Brazilians, who were marginalized and exploited in this new nation. Josh...

In April 2024, we lost one of the greatest American philosophers of our time—Daniel Dennett. Known for his brilliant mind and controversial views, his contributions to philosophy include topics like consciousness, AI, evolution, atheism, intentions, free will and moral responsibility. In this special episode remembering his life and work, Josh and Ray are joined by Jenann Ismael from Johns Hopkins...

Looking for some deep dives into pop culture this summer? Josh and Ray talk to Sandra Laugier from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, author of TV-Philosophy in Action: The Ethics and Politics of TV Series, and Nathaniel Goldberg from Washington & Lee University, co-author of Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain the World. And they get recommendations...

Looking for some deep dives into pop culture this summer? Josh and Ray talk to Sandra Laugier from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, author of TV-Philosophy in Action: The Ethics and Politics of TV Series, and Nathaniel Goldberg from Washington & Lee University, co-author of Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain the World. And they get recommendations...

Logic may seem like a dry, abstract discipline that only the nerdiest of philosophers study. After all, logic textbooks are full of weird symbols and proofs about abstruse entities, like “the set of all sets.” On the other hand, don’t we all try to think logically, at least in some contexts? Why do we believe, for example, it’s bad to contradict yourself and good to be coherent? And what’s the con...

Mary Wollstonecraft is often labeled as a “liberal feminist” because of her concern for women’s rights and conceptions of freedom. But that label narrows her work, which was broadly critical of all social inequalities that distort human relations. So why did Wollstonecraft think that virtue is not truly possible unless we are all free? What did she think was key to the liberation of women? And wha...

Quantum mechanics, mathematics, human consciousness…. whichever way you slice it, the universe is weird. How can our conscious minds be made from unconscious atoms? What should we make of quantum entanglement, or the fact that light can be both a particle and a wave? Why is it that there are exactly as many fractions as there are whole numbers? Josh and Ray raise an eyebrow with Eric Schwitzgebel...

Over 400 years after his death, Shakespeare is still widely regarded as the greatest dramatist of all time. His many plays tackle questions about power, influence, identity, and moral and social status. His characters—be they villains or heroes—are often disdained because of their race, religion, class, disability, or gender. So what do Shakespeare’s plays reveal about identity and status in his t...

Mind reading might sound like the stuff of science fiction. But in philosophy and psychology, mind reading is something that human beings do whenever we try to guess what another person is thinking. Could it be that people are also natural born mind sharers, unconsciously shaping our behavior to be understood by others? How do we change or exaggerate our actions when others are present? And how ca...

Margaret Cavendish was a writer of poetry, philosophy, polemics, histories, plays, and utopian fiction. She employed many different genres as a way to overcome access barriers for women and build an audience for her subversive philosophical ideas. So, what was so radical about Cavendish’s views? Why did she think all matter, even rocks, was at least partially rational? And how did she anticipate t...

What movies of the past year challenged your assumptions and made you think about things in new ways? Josh and guest co-host Jeremy Sabol present our annual Dionysus Awards for the most thought-provoking movies of 2023, including: Best Film about Social Justice that Wonders What Makes a Good Film about Social Justice Most Disturbing Exploration of a Female Criminal Who Thinks She May Be Innocent M...

18th-century Korean philosopher Im Yunjidang was the first Confucian to argue for women’s equality in matters of morality and to claim that women, just like men, can be sages. She also argued that it isn’t just what you do that matters morally—it’s also how you decide. So what does it mean to be a sage and how does someone become one? How did Im Yunjidang use traditional Confucian texts to argue f...

Artificial intelligence is everywhere in our day-to-day lives and our interactions with the world. And it’s made impressive progress at a variety of visual, linguistic, and reasoning tasks. Does this improved performance indicate that computers are thinking, or is it just an engineering artifact? Can it help us understand how children acquire knowledge and develop language skills? Or are humans fu...

Philosophy Talk made its radio debut on August 20, 2003 with a live pilot on KALW San Francisco and weekly broadcasts beginning in January 2004. To celebrate two decades on the air, in November 2023 we held our first-ever Quiz Night. Longtime listeners and first-time fans filled KALW’s popup space in downtown San Francisco as Director of Research Laura Maguire ran eight teams through the gauntlet...

When Ken Taylor passed away, he was working on a manuscript titled Farewell to the Republic We Once Dreamed of. Was Ken right to think the American experiment is on the verge of collapse? Are we heading for authoritarian rule, a national divorce, or even a civil war? Or could better days be on the horizon? In Ken’s honor, Josh and Ray devote their end-of-year special to probing the future of the A...

Philosophers often speculate about possible worlds: ways that things could be. Some of them also believe in impossible worlds: ways that things couldn’t be. Are impossible worlds places where strange things happen, or descriptions, or abstract objects, or something else entirely? How can you describe an impossibility without contradicting yourself? Could we imagine worlds where even the laws of lo...